Bad Service

Accent stereotyping free!

Due to Mark-My-Agent being a putz (as told by NEW-agent, Michelle) I had lost my account with Progressive (of six years) for my car insurance. He was the one who screwed up my zipcode at some point (some documents in my file have the correct one and some have the wrong one), and I never received a 'please verify your address' letter, because it went to the wrong address in a near-by town -- Mark was all "D'oh!" And said he'd find me quotes for a new account with a different company. "I'll call you right back!" he says.

He doesn't. So I call him.

Phone tag ensues.

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Let me preface this by saying that both of my parents are educators and I have worked a little in education myself, so I'm well aware of how stressed out and swamped school administrators can be, but this was a little ridiculous.

I'm a journalist with the local paper (shameless plug) and I'm working on fact-checking basic stats about all of our city's public schools - the official name, address, enrollment, and size of the teaching staff. That's it. Nothing too involved. Most schools were able to give me this information in 30 seconds or less and were very agreeable.

Out of around 50 schools, however, there were 4 schools that I just could not get in touch with - it was a maze of answering machines and no calls back. So I called someone at Santa Fe Public Schools' administration offices, whose job title is something to the effect of Public Outreach (I won't put her actual title here), let's call her TK. I was directed to her by a few people who said she would have the information I needed.

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